Beast of the Forest

The sounds of rain and draining water echoed like a calming white noise machine. Misty always used one to go to sleep, otherwise it took her hours to go down, although she usually sets it to turn off after running for a few hours. In her half-slumber, she could feel that something was off but ignored it as to drift back to sleep. The air was fresh, moist, and had a satisfying chill, perfect for sleeping without a blanket. Her usual blanket was stained by some spilled marinara sauce during one of her worst habits, eating in bed.

Misty was unassuming, one among millions, and her life was slowly sliding downwards into a spiral of failures and depression. She had a useless degree that she lost passion for halfway through earning it, and she was single, alone, and broke. All she had to her name was a tiny apartment out in the sticks, and a car that was one pothole away from crumbling into rusted dust. No matter how hard she tried or how badly she wanted it, life just never gave her any meaningful opportunities. No jobs where her art degree could be used, no jobs where she could try to get her foot in the door and gain some decent paying skills, no helicopter parents to give her even a cent if she told them she needed heart surgery. Misty couldn't even find a man, every time she's tried with one, they leave her before the relationship gets started. She was stuck in every sense of the word, and her lifestyle had begun to slip, which was the reason she was now sleeping in two layers of pants and two layers of shirts and a hoodie to keep warm instead of a clean blanket.

These failures continued to nag at her to the point where she just couldn't fall back to sleep, and so she laid there, groggy, with her eyes sealed shut, hoping that she could at least enjoy another hour of rest before she had to face the terrible realities of life.

BOOM! Crackle crackle....

Thunder rang out like a gunshot, directly above her, and the white flash of lightning pierced her eyelids. Misty shot up, her heart pounding.

"I've never heard my white noise machine play thund-" she started to think, before her eyes caught up with her ears and she took in her environment. She wasn't in the bed she fell asleep in, she wasn't in her apartment, and it didn't even look like she was on the same continent as she was before. Above her, the massive leaves of tall, wild trees covered up most of the sky, and where they didn't cover, the sky was the dark grey of heavy thunderclouds. Rain poured down out of the gaps sparsely, most of the water being caught by the leaves and running down the trunks of their thirsty branches. Vines and moss wrapped around them, lapping up the droplets the trees didn't suck up, and at their feet, water pooled within tangled nests of snake-like roots protruding from the earth. The ground she was on was moss, fluffy, green, but around her, there were black marks, almost like the earth was scorched into shapes that surrounded her, like she was the center of a small crop-circle.

Misty's heart was running a million miles a minute, one second she was too groggy to even think straight, and the next she had so much adrenaline in her system that she could hear her own heartbeat thudding in her ears. She got up quickly, brushing off her backside frantically to wipe off any dirt or moss that stuck to her, and she tried to get her bearings, find some kind of path, a walkway, a road, any sign of nearby civilization.

"A r-river," she said out loud, her own voice calming her and giving her direction. "I should find a river."

All around her, the forest looked identical, but the parting between two particular trees looked wider than the rest, so she arbitrarily chose to head in that direction, desperately gripping onto any semblance of a sense of direction.